Professional installers of stretched or wall-to-wall carpeting commonly utilize a common claw hammer for nailing thin wooden carpet tack strips about the periphery of floor surfaces. In use of such hammers for such nailing tasks, level nail head striking swings of the hammer's handle and hammerhead must be repeatedly executed close to the floor's surface. Such hammering action near a floor surface commonly swings a carpet layers, fingers, and knuckles into close proximity with the floor surface, and such motion often undesirably and painfully results in erroneous forceful contacts between the floor and the fingers and knuckles.
Also in use of such claw hammer for carpet tack strip installation, the carpet layer often needs to trim to length a segment of carpet tack stripping in order to complete a strip extension to a wall. When such need for cutting a carpet tack strip to length arises, the carpet layer is commonly required to set aside a claw hammer and to retrieve for use a separate wood cutting tool such as shears, side cutters or a saw. Following usage of such separate wood cutting tool, the carpet layer must set aside the wood cutting tool, and retrieve the claw hammer for resumption of floor nailing of the specially sized carpet tack strip segment. Such steps of settings aside and retrievals of a separate cutting tool undesirably reduce costs economies by requiring the purchase and maintenance of a separate wood cutting tool, and the additional steps undesirably increases time and effort dedicated to the tool setting aside and retrieval steps.
Further drawbacks and deficiencies relating to a carpet layer's use of a common claw hammer are recognized when the carpet layer works within a room including finished cabinets having floor level “toe kick” recesses. Such toe kick recesses advantageously allow an occupant of the room to closely approach a cabinet's countertop without allowing the occupant's shoe tips to impinge against the cabinet's base. Such recesses commonly have a horizontal depth between 2½-3½ inches, and have a vertical height between 3 inches and 3½ inches. Where wall-to-wall carpet is installed within a room including such toe kick equipped cabinets, the carpeting desirably extends into and covers floor surfaces within the recesses. Accordingly, carpet tack strips often are desirably installed within toe kick recesses. Since a common claw hammer cannot be effectively swung within a toe kick recess, a carpet layer seeking to install carpet tack stripping within such recess typically must set aside the claw hammer and utilize a specialized tool, such as a nail driver bar, to drive carpet tack strip nails within the recess. Similarly with the above described undesirable steps of setting aside and retrieving a cutting tool, utilization of a separate nail driver bar to drive nails within toe kick recess is undesirably uneconomical, requiring the further procurement and maintenance of a separate tool, and further wastes time, effort, and motion by requiring additional tool setting aside and retrieval steps.
The instant inventive carpet tack strip working tool solves or ameliorates the problems, defects, and deficiencies discussed above by providing a single specially configured tool which is capable of performing multiple functions of finger protected floor level tack strip nailing, toe kick space tack strip nailing, and tack strip cutting.